Steve Sailer at Vdare hits the Waco 2 nail on the head in terms of plain facts. Polygamy is unquestionably a bad idea in modern civilization, and it's good for authorities to discourage it. Most of the polygamous cults and families engage in welfare fraud, and polygamy always leads to inbreeding (check out the unibrows on the compound wives for evidence!) and large numbers of leftover useless males.

But those facts don't justify a witch-hunt. The real goal of this particular witch-hunt, as with all pogroms, has nothing to do with discouraging bad forms of mating, and everything to do with megalomaniacal prosecutors.

If Texas really wanted to discourage polygamous practices, welfare fraud, and 'children having children', it could do all of those things much more effectively, cheaply and quietly by looking closely at its welfare and WIC clients. Permanent poverty, especially in black ghettos, always involves a tribal form of polygamy, with the alpha male living off the state checks of his harem.

Prosecutors will never work in that direction because they know that the Civil Rights Establishment will destroy them. When prosecutors tear into a weird semi-Christian cult, they know that the entire political and media culture will cheer. It's an easy choice.

The big problem, aside from the utter corruption of the court system, is that America used to be the last refuge, the place where strangely dressed religious groups were welcomed, and where their contributions were encouraged and used. Kansas became the breadbasket of the world because we welcomed Mennonites, who escaped from witch-hunting prosecution in Russia and Germany. America became the leader in physics and space exploration because we welcomed Jewish scientists, who escaped from pogroms in Russia and Germany.

And now we are the homeland of the pogrom.

Now that we've "come for" the polygamists with no resistance from any meaningful source, it will be vastly easier to "come for" other odd and self-contained groups. Their productivity or intelligence won't matter.

About Me

Polistra was named after the original townsite of Manhattan (the one in Kansas). When I was growing up in Manhattan, I spent a lot of time exploring by foot, bike, and car. I discovered the ruins of an old mill along Wildcat Creek, and decided (inaccurately) that it was the remains of the original site of Polistra. Accurate or not, I've always liked the name, with its echoes of Poland (an under-appreciated friend of freedom) and stars. ==== The title icon is explained here. ==== Switchover: This 2007 entry marks a sharp change in worldview from neocon to pure populist. ===== The long illustrated story of Polistra's Dream is a time-travel fable, attempting to answer the dangerous revision of New Deal history propagated by Amity Shlaes. The Dream has 8 episodes, linked in a chain from the first. This entry explains the Shlaes connection.